We recently stumbled on a brilliant article by Jan Tegze that talks about the importance of skills when you’re advertising for your current job opening. It struck a chord with us here at Jobjet.

Tegze’s main point is that the years of experience someone has should not necessarily be the main qualifier for someone’s ability to do a certain job. He argues that a better recruiting strategy is one that focuses more on skills rather the number of years someone has. Nowadays, the needs for different roles change so frequently. The number of years someone has is not a competitive advantage anymore.

Why we agree

The main premise of Jobjet is to empower recruiters to find those hidden top candidates that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise. Some of those candidates do not have years of experience but have the exact skill set that a hiring manager needs for the position. Our tool aims at making those candidates accessible to hiring managers, sourcers, and recruiters.

What we’ve done

Our product philosophy here at Jobjet is to think of better ways to recruit. When we developed our Candidate Cloud, we thought of the best ways that a recruiter would want to find their candidates. The solution was boolean search. But we had to think of what to make searchable. What made most sense was:

  • Skills
  • Years of experience

There is a lot more that a recruiter can look up through a boolean search but these are arguably the two most important, next to location. The feedback we’ve gotten from our customers has been great. Searching through a specific skill has made recruiting, especially for tech positions, so much easier and much more accurate.  

Conclusion

Here at Jobjet, we do everything we can to empower you to get to the ideal candidate faster and more accurately. One of the ways we try to do that is through a Boolean Search through our database. You can not only search for a candidate through the number of years they have in a particular field but also but also through specific skills they have.

So Jan, yes we agree with you. In fact, we’ve done exactly what you’re talking about and we hope more people use it.

If you’d like to read Tegze’s article, you can read it on SourceCon.